Revisiting ‘Playing With My Friends’ 3 years later
Hello world, thanks for checking out my first blog post! It’s been three years (!!!) since I put together a music video project called ‘Playing With My Friends’ (aka PWMF) which ended up being one of the biggest and most fulfilling professional undertakings of my career.
Today I’m going to reflect on the project as a whole, I plan on diving into individual videos and personnel in future posts. Enjoy!
The Concept
When the world shut down in March of 2020, working musicians suddenly lost all of our gigs. This proved to be a financial strain as well as a creative one. It didn’t take long for musicians to start looking for ways to express themselves, as well as make money without leaving home.
I came up with a project of my own, creating music videos with friends by sending home-recorded audio/video back and forth and each time layering tracks on top. In order to get all of the musicians and production team compensation I planned to attempt crowdfunding the project. I decided to call the project ‘Playing With My Friends’.
The Process
‘PWMF’ title card courtesy of Brendan Keogh
This project meant a lot of firsts for me as I had never done any crowdfunding, video production, or home recording/release at this level. The area I was most comfortable in was writing and arranging music, so I started by sketching out some original tunes as well as ideas for covers.
I decided to take a leap of faith and make some ‘test drive’ videos, two short original tunes with 5-6 musicians. I knew I’d want to record some covers as well, so I picked a snippet of one of my favorite Led Zeppelin songs, ‘The Crunge’ to experiment with as well. I recorded some scratch tracks, and reached out to some friends to record audio/video to see if the project could potentially work.
In order to produce the videos I turned to my good friend and former bandmate Brendan Keogh, who was crucial to the entire project. He was able to sync up and arrange the videos as well as add a title screen, and the results were fantastic. I sent the audio to another good friend and bandmate Christopher Hawthorn to produce the audio. Again, outstanding results!
Once the first three videos had been produced, I created the Gofundme and started sending the link to everyone I could. The goal was to raise $2,000 to reimburse myself for the first three videos, and create five more paying many artists and creating great videos.
The Result
Snapshot from Playing With My Friends video #7 “Groove Me (Fontella Bass)”
I’m happy to report the project was fully funded in 40 days, with 32 donations ranging from $20-250. You can check out the Gofundme page here.
Here are all eight videos, in chronological order from release date:
Reincarnation of a Lovebird (Charles Mingus)
Only So Much Oil (Tower of Power)
As I write this post, the most viewed video is Only So Much Oil with 4.2k views! Rescue Me is the runner up with 3.4k views.
Here are all of the amazing artists that were involved in the project:
Hannah Lebel (vocals), Nicole D’Elisa (vocals), Avery Cooper (saxophone), Matt Dolliver (saxophone), Taylor Smith (saxophone), Glen Wallace (trumpet), Christopher Hawthorn (trumpet & sound mixing), Nate Reit (trombone), Jesse Metzler (trombone), Matt Avery (trombone), Mike Fried (keyboard), Derek Rice (keyboard), Jacob Ungerleider (keyboard), Colin Lenox (guitar), Marshall Dominguez (guitar), Collin Craig (guitar), Dan Bishop (bass), Brendan Keogh (bass & video editing), Craig Myers (percussion), Jacob ‘Deva’ Racusin (percussion), Caleb Bronz (drums), Cotter Ellis (drums), Dan Ryan (drums)
What’s Next?
As I reminisce on the project three years later, I’m hoping to write some more posts about the individual videos as well as personnel. I’m also planning on remastering the tracks to post on streaming platforms!
I have a few tracks that started during the project and fizzled out, I’m excited to finish these and put more music out into the universe.
Thanks for reading-more fun PWMF behind the scenes looks and other content to come soon!
-Matt